Interviews

posted on 09 July 2008 14:34

If you have ever had to restore your PC's software from scratch; the complete software works from operating system to every last piece of software, then you will love the idea of bare metal restore; a single file to restore, containing every last software nut and bolt, everything, that is streamed onto your new hard drive in a single operation. How good is that?

Acronis builds, develops and sells bare metal restore and snapshot software. We had the opportunity to talk with Kevin Moreau, Acronis' General Manager for the UK & Ireland, about the company and its products and what they can do for customers:

Blocks and Files: Could you provide a quick overview of the Acronis products please, and the operating systems they support?

Kevin Moreau: Acronis has worked in the back-up and recovery sector for almost a decade. Today we provide the storage management software needed to move, manage and maintain everyone’s digital assets – whether on laptops, desktops or servers, and regardless of whether users are working in physical or virtual environments. We are amongst only a handful of companies that can help users recover or deploy to dissimilar hardware – giving much more flexibility to data migration, backup, recovery and deployment strategies. We also provide one of the safest ways to seamlessly migrate to from and between virtualised and physical environments without service interruption or data loss. This significantly reduces the time and costs associated with disk drive recovery, file deletions and other disasters.

AcronisTrue Image Echo is our award-winning flagship software. It’s an easy-to-use data backup and recovery solution for laptops, PCs and servers running on Windows or Linux - in either physical or virtual environments. Key functions include the ability to create live disk snapshots, run bare-metal disaster recoveries and restore to dissimilar hardware using Acronis Universal Restore, available separately.

We also offer Acronis Snap Deploy, which has helped revolutionise the way in which companies deploy new hardware. Instead of configuring each individual machine and then installing the applications, customers use the software to quickly install a standard, identical image. Also, when used in conjunction with the Acronis Universal Deploy module, it can quickly install images across different makes and models of PCs and servers, without having to create a new template for each variation.

Blocks and Files: What are the current trends affecting customers that impel them to buy these products?

Kevin Moreau: Many of our customers are SMEs. They face the same IT challenges as larger organisations, but are more vulnerable when it comes to recovering from a disaster as they have fewer resources and technical expertise to throw at potential problems. Our software helps as it can provide a single, simple-to-use solution that automates many key backup and recovery tasks.

This means that one or two people can respond immediately to a potential issue that would, otherwise, need to be handled over several days by an entire IT department. Obviously, this is a also great advantage to enterprise customers too, as they can refocus their existing IT teams on more day-to-day tasks – helping them move from a reactive to proactive way of working.

Blocks and Files: Why is a 'bare-metal restore' method better than alternative PC and server protection methods?

Kevin Moreau: Basically, bare-metal restore is a data recovery and restoration technique that allows you to restore a computer system on a "bare metal" machine, i.e. without the need for there to be any software - even an operating system - on the system you’re restoring to. Disk imaging enables bare-metal restores by storing copies of an entire hard disk’s contents. This is much quicker than restoring from a conventional backup, which may require operating system and applications to be manually installed and configured, patches to be applied, and then data restored – all of which can literally take days. By comparison, a bare-metal restore can be completed in minutes.

With some solutions, the hardware receiving the restore needs to have an identical configuration to the hardware that was the source of the backup – but that’s not the case with Acronis. Bare metal restore with dissimilar hardware restore basically means you have total freedom in restoring and migrating systems with less dependency on the underlying hardware. It should be seen, beyond Disaster recovery, as a very efficient way to evolve one’s infrastructure to adapt to the company’s changing needs.

Blocks and Files: How do Acronis products work with VMware virtualisation?

Kevin Moreau: Acronis has been a VMware Technology Alliance Partner for over two years. It’s a very logical partnership as Acronis’ products have been optimised for, and integrated with, VMware's virtual infrastructure solutions. We allow Acronis customers to quickly migrate their imaged machines to VMware by directly converting the images to VMDK files so they can boot in Vmware in a simple and straightforward manner.

VMware customers using the free VMware converter tool can also virtualize machines directly from an image created by Acronis Products (.tib file format). Even more importantly, we will backup and restore virtual machines exactly as we would for physical machines so customers can manage mixed environments with one solution, The partnership enhances the value proposition beyond server utilisation and provides VMware customers with all the benefits of advanced storage management and disaster recovery on physical and virtual machines. This means customers have ‘all their bases covered’ and can be a lot more confident when working in a virtual environment.

Blocks and Files: How does Acronis view other virtualisation environments such as Citrix Xen Server, Microsoft's Hyper-V, and Virtual Iron?

Kevin Moreau: Our customers work across lots of different virtual environments, so it’s in our interest to support as many virtual environments as we can – and remain ‘virtually’ agnostic. As such, we support multiple hardware platforms and operating systems, including both 32- and 64-bit servers as well as Microsoft, XenSource and Parallels virtual environments.

Blocks and Files: What new trends are likely to affect customers that Acronis would respond to?

Kevin Moreau: The first wave of server virtualisation was all about consolidation and raising utilisation levels. Now we are seeing server virtualisation implementations that have been designed specifically to deliver cost-effective disaster recovery and business continuity. Going forward, we also expect it to be the enabling technology for SME, enterprise and data centre environments of the future.

However, without comprehensive virtualisation management tools, enterprises will not be able to fully realise the technology’s benefits. That’s why we believe combining real-time disk imaging and backup capabilities with server virtualisation is a powerful value proposition. It will enable companies of all sizes to create a fully integrated, multi-platform solution with complete flexibility, back-up and recovery capabilities to meet all their business requirements.

Another more down to earth trend we anticipate is the migration to the new Microsoft platforms (Vista and Server 2008) as MS is trying to phase out the older versions. We can help in a number of ways: 1 - by allowing the quick deployment of the OS partitions (not touching the data partition) to the many machines of an environment in a fast, non-disruptive and cost effective manner, and 2 - by providing a roll back plan to the original state, if the upgrade does not work as planned. It is important to have a roll back strategy for any upgrade program.

Commentary: The drum beat we hear is about virtualisation spreading and spreading. The idea of restoring a PC or server to a virtual machine instead of a physical one, or as a virtual machine, is terrific. A hardware server dies, a new one comes online and the VMs are restored to it in a bare metal restore operation rather than being set up from the beginning in a rolling sequence of software installations.

Acronis software can also be used to populate new PCs and servers with a fully-configured software environment that's ready to run in a bare metal install procedure.

This is software that turns an IT shop with admin staff installing and re-installing (restoring) software by hand, a quasi-craft operation, into a production shop with automated operation. It is intuitively much more efficient and dependable.

A by-product of virtualisation is that the number of servers, meaning virtual servers, that sysadms have to deal with will rise, possibly by a factor of five, possibly higher. Acronis products will help you avoid having to increase the amount of server and PC sysadm resource in step with the increase in the number of (virtual) servers.

^{[B&F staff]}